This document was adopted as an OLAC standard on 8 July 2003 following a final review by the OLAC Advisory Board. Minor changes were made in response to Advisory Board feedback: adding a note about the reliance of the Coordinators on the Advisory Board (in section 3), simplifying Participating Archives and Services to just Archives and Services (in section 3), limiting the testing period for a candidate document to a maximum of six months (in section 5), and specifying that the Coordinators should be subscribed to every working group mailing list (in section 6).

Table of contents

1. Introduction

This document is the standard that defines how the Open Language
Archives Community (OLAC) is organized and how it operates. It begins by describing the purpose and vision of OLAC and the four core values which guide OLAC's operation. With this foundation, it sets out the organizational structure, three types of documents together with a document process, a working group process, and finally a registration process.

In developing this
standard, many ideas have been adapted from the process documents of four other
standards efforts: [DCMI-Process], [IETF-Process],
[OASIS-Process], and [W3C-Process]. The organization and
process developed for OLAC are much simpler, however. This is fitting since
OLAC is a small community with limited resources and—like most open
source projects—it crucially depends upon the volunteer participation of many
part-time members.

2. Governing ideas

In a successful enterprise, the participants have shared purpose,
vision, and core values. These are what Peter Senge calls the "governing ideas"
of the enterprise [Senge94]. The governing ideas answer three critical
questions: "Why?" "What?" and "How?" Together they answer the question,
"What do we believe in?"

Purpose (or mission) is the "Why?"—the enterprise's answer
to the question, "Why do we exist?"

Vision is the "What?"—the picture of the future the
enterprise seeks to create.

Core values are the "How?"—these answer the question, "How
do we want to act consistent with our mission, along the path toward achieving
our vision?"

The purpose (or mission) of OLAC is as follows:

OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an international
partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide
virtual library of language resources by:

developing consensus on best current practice for the digital
archiving of language resources, and

developing a network of interoperating repositories and services
for housing and accessing such resources.

The vision of OLAC is described elsewhere in terms of "the seven
pillars of language archiving" [OLAC-Vision] and shares much in common
with the Open Archives Initiative [OAI]. In a nutshell, it is
that:

Any user on the Internet should be able to go to a single GATEWAY to find
all the language resources available at all participating institutions, whether
the resources be DATA, TOOLS, or ADVICE. The community will ensure on-going
interoperation and quality by following STANDARDS for the METADATA that
describe resources and for processes that REVIEW
them.

The following core values guide the means that OLAC employs to
achieve its vision:

Openness

By open we mean "freely available to all interested parties."
This implies visibility, accessibility, and reusability. All of the metadata
published by participating archives are open (though the resources they describe need not be). All of the documents
published by OLAC are open. The processes by which those documents are
developed are also open. Individual membership in OLAC and its working groups is open to all interested parties

Consensus

Decision making in OLAC is governed by the principle of
consensus. A proposed standard or recommendation is adopted only when
those who have reviewed it share substantial agreement that it is ready to be
adopted by the community. This principle does not require unanimous consent,
but requires far more than a simple majority. As a rule-of-thumb, decisions in OLAC
should be based on at least 80% agreement. In the Advisory Board and Council, consensus is achieved when no more than one member objects to a proposal.

Empowering the players

The standard protocols and processes that define the framework for the
community are not set by an executive committee or by members who have paid
dues. Rather, they are set by those who are actually "playing the game."
The only price paid by participating institutions is to implement the standards of the community. The greatest voice in the consensus process that sets the standards and recommendations of the community will be given to those who are most active in implementing them.

Peer review

As a part of the academic community, OLAC places a high value on peer
review. All of the standards and documents of OLAC go through a process of
peer review that is open to all who want to participate. To assure quality within its network of interoperating repositories and services, OLAC solicits anonymous peer review regarding conformance of participating institutions to its standards and recommendations. In addition it supports signed peer
review for evaluations it does not solicit.

3. Organization

This section describes the organization of OLAC in terms of the groups
of participants that play key roles. This document only defines the groups; see
[OLAC-Organization] on the OLAC web site for a complete list of the
currently participating individuals and institutions.

Coordinators

The persons who oversee the operation of the process described in this
document, relying on input from the Advisory Board as needed.

Advisory Board

The members of the advisory board are persons who are recognized by
their peers as being leaders within a subcommunity (whether defined by
discipline or by geography) of the wider language resources and digital
archiving community. They serve at the invitation of the OLAC Coordinators.
The term of service is two years and is renewable. The role of an advisory board member is two-fold: to advise the Coordinators about how to respond to
particular concerns of their subcommunities, and to promote OLAC within their
subcommunities.

Council

A panel of individuals (numbering from seven to nine) who make decisions for the community as described below in The document process and The registration process. Members of the Council must have experiential knowledge of OLAC gained through being involved in the implementation or operation of an OLAC repository or service, and must be willing and able to commit time and energy to the functions of the Council. Geographic and domain distribution of members is relevant, but will not override the other criteria. Council members serve a term of two years, renewable. Council members are nominated by the Coordinators and ratified by consensus of the Advisory Board.

Archives and Services

Data providers and service providers [OAI-FAQ] that are following the OLAC
standards and have been successfully registered on the OLAC
web site. For each registered archive or service, there is a designated contact person with
whom the OLAC Coordinators communicate to conduct community
business.

Working Groups

Groups of individuals who participate in the OLAC process by drafting
documents that are eventually submitted to the community as proposed standards,
recommendations, or notes. A working group may also be formed for the purpose
of cooperating in the implementation of standards, recommendations, or notes.
For each working group, there is a chairperson who serves as the designated
contact person.

Participating Individuals

Members of the wider user community who are interested in
participating in the OLAC process. They become individual members by subscribing to the general mailing list on the OLAC web site. As subscribers they
receive all community-wide announcements, which include invitations to participate in newly formed working groups and to give comments on all proposed OLAC documents when they are put to the community for review.

4. Types of documents

A key aspect of the OLAC process is how documents are developed and promulgated,
for it is through documents that OLAC defines itself and the practices that it
promotes. The documents published by OLAC are of three types:

Standard

A standard describes procedures that archives and
services must follow when participating in the activities of the community or
specifications they must follow when implementing an archive or service.

Recommendation

A recommendation describes the OLAC consensus on the best current
practice regarding some aspect of language-resource archiving. Data providers
and service providers (as well as the projects and individuals that create
language resources) are encouraged, but not required, to follow these
recommendations. The public review of archives and services may
include an assessment of degree of conformance to recommended
practices.

Note

A note is any document published by OLAC that is neither a standard
nor a recommendation. One purpose of notes is to ensure that standards and
recommendations stay focused on rules and principles. Extended discussion or
details of implementations should be treated separately in supporting notes.
Another purpose for notes is to provide a venue for perspectives that are not widely
held. For instance, a note could be:

Experimental. A note could propose a new or different
approach that is not mature enough to be put forward as a standard or a
recommendation but that has enough merit to put forward within the community
for peer review.

Informational. A note could give helpful information
related to some aspect of a standard or recommendation, such as a description
of historical background, an elaboration, a rationale, a non-normative
explanation, or even an alternative viewpoint.

Implementational. A note could give a description of a
particular approach to implementing a standard or recommendation.

5. The document process

The OLAC document process defines how documents get endorsed and
published by OLAC. This involves moving through a life cycle that has six possible status categories. Each status is defined in terms of the activities that are required for advancing it to the next status:

Draft

A document has draft status as soon as it enters the process. It may enter by one of two means. (1) Any working
group may create a draft document. (2) An author who is not part of a working
group may submit a draft document to the OLAC Coordinators. In the latter case,
the Coordinators have two options: they may choose for the document to be
processed in a working group (either by directing the author to join an
existing working group or by assisting the author to form a new one), or they
may solicit feedback from reviewers of their choice.

A document remains under development with draft status until either its developers choose to withdraw it from the process, or the people processing it (whether a working group or the Coordinators with ad hoc reviewers) reach consensus that the document is
ready to be presented to the entire community as a proposal.

Proposed

When a document achieves proposed status, the OLAC Coordinators send a
call for review with a specific deadline date to the entire community. The basic question that is asked of reviewers depends on the type of document:

Standard. Is the document ready to serve OLAC as a
standard? (Reviewers should agree with the content since they will be obligated
to follow it.)

Recommendation. Is the document ready to be put forward to
the language resources community as recommended best practice? (Reviewers should agree that
the described practice will produce high-quality metadata or resources, though they are
not obligated to follow the practice.)

Note. Is the document ready for publication? (Reviewers are
not asked to agree with all the content, only to agree that it is of adequate quality to be published.)

At the
end of the review period, the Coordinators and the Council deliberate concerning the feedback that is received. By consensus, they reach one of five outcomes:

Release. The document is ready as-is to be promoted to the
next stage in the life cycle.

Revise. The document is nearly ready for promotion to the next stage, but the editors should make specified revisions and a final review made by the Coordinators and Council before it is promoted.

Resubmit. The response to the call for review was inadequate. Thus the document should be submitted
back to the whole community for an additional period of review.

Rework. The document needs substantial rework. When the editors complete the next version, it should be submitted
again for review by the whole community.

Reject. The document is not well founded or is not adequately relevant in the context of OLAC, and should be withdrawn from the process.

The outcome of the review is reported to the whole community via the general mailing list.

Standards, recommendations, and some notes require implementation and
community experience to ensure that they are ready for adoption. These
documents are promoted to candidate status and enter a testing phase. Notes that
require no implementation may go straight to adoption.

Candidate

When a document enters candidate status, the OLAC Coordinators send a
call for implementation with a specific deadline date to the entire community.
The implementation period will be set for a duration not shorter than one month
nor longer than six months, depending on the anticipated difficulty of
implementation. At the end of the testing period, a call for review is
issued in which the community members who have actually put the document to use
are invited to describe their experience and comment on whether it is ready to
advance to adoption, potentially with changes they might recommend. The process for evaluating the results of the review and
advancing to adopted status is as described for the proposed stage.

Adopted

A document may remain in the adopted status for an indefinite period.
Its status remains as adopted until the Coordinators and Council make a decision to move it to
retired status. (Once adopted a document may not be withdrawn; it may only be
retired.)

Retired

A document attains retired status only upon a decision of the Coordinators and Council. It typically happens automatically when it is superseded by the adoption of a newer
version of the same document. A document may also be superseded by the adoption of an
altogether different document, or may be judged to have
simply outlived its usefulness.

Withdrawn

The status of a document changes to withdrawn when it is
removed from the document process before attaining adopted status.

Changes to adopted documents. In the case of corrections or
editorial refinements, the OLAC Coordinators may authorize a new version of an
adopted document without going through community review. However, any
substantive changes must be processed through the Council. The Council will determine the status of the revised document: whether the changes are minor enough to adopt the revision without a round of testing, whether it should become a candidate so as to invoke a period of testing, or whether the changes are so great that the document should revert to proposed status so as to invoke a call for review by the whole community. When the new version is in candidate or proposed status, its header section must show a link to the adopted version that is currently in force.

Documenting dissent. The appropriate place for the discussion
of dissenting opinions about aspects of a document is in the mailing list for
the working group that has sponsored the document. In this way the alternative
ideas will not be lost, but will become part of the permanent archive of the
working group's mailing list. At any time, dissenting ideas may be given a more
prominent form by developing them into an experimental note that proposes an
alternative approach or into an informational note that discusses the relative
merits of different approaches.

Intellectual property rights. All documents published by OLAC
on its web site are published under the terms of the Open Publication License
[OPL]. Typically, the authors or editors of the document will be
listed as the copyright holders.

6. The working group process

Working groups play a fundamental role in the OLAC process as the
primary source of the documents that enter the OLAC document process. In
keeping with the OLAC core value of openness, working groups are open to
observation and participation by any member of the community. They are
self-organizing in that members of the community may recognize the need for a
working group and set it up on their own initiative.

Formation. A working group is formed by three or more individual members of OLAC who represent at least three different institutions. In order to form a working group, the
prospective group must submit the following to the OLAC Coordinators:

the name of the working group

a statement of purpose that is germane to the purpose of OLAC

the names and email addresses of members representing at least
three different institutions

the name of the chairperson

a list of planned documents and the projected date for completing
the development phase of each

When the above conditions are satisfactorily met, the OLAC
Coordinators will set up a web page for the working group and a mailing list
that is seeded with the initial membership list. The OLAC Coordinators will also be subscribed to the mailing list as a way of keeping informed of the working group’s activities. When tho web page and mailing list are in place, a
call for participation will be sent out to the entire OLAC community. Any
person who wants to participate in the development of the planned documents may
subscribe to the mailing list and thereby become a member of the working
group.

Chairperson. The working group chairperson serves as the point
of contact with the OLAC Coordinators concerning the activities of the working
group. The chairperson is responsible to keep the working group moving toward
completing the documents listed on its web page and to communicate changes of
plans for the working group to the OLAC Coordinators. A chairperson may resign
or may be removed by a 2/3 vote of the working group members. A vacancy is
filled by election from among members of the working group.

Meetings. Working groups typically conduct their business
electronically, via their web page and their mailing list. If and when working
groups do want to meet by teleconference or face-to-face, the working group
members or their institutions will bear such costs.

Activities. The most concerted activity of a working group
takes place while its documents are in the draft stage. Once a document
reaches proposed status, the working group gets involved only when the
community review calls for major revisions. Such revisions should be vetted
within the working group before the document is resubmitted for community-wide
review.

Decision making. The decision making within a working group
will generally be done informally by gauging the sense of the traffic on the
mailing list. However, silence should not necessarily be taken as consensus. At critical decision points, the chairperson should ask working group members for explicit feedback to ensure that consensus has indeed been achieved.

Dissolution. A working group will remain constituted as long as
it is making progress towards developing planned documents or as long as
documents it has developed are in proposed or candidate status. When these
conditions are no longer met, the working group may elect to dissolve itself or may
be dissolved by the OLAC Coordinators.

7. The registration process

The OLAC web site provides a mechanism for institutions or individuals to request that their repository or service be enrolled as a participating archive or service. To successfully enroll as an OLAC Archive, the repository must meet the following criteria:

It must catalog language resources.

It must conform to the standards of OLAC.

To successfully enroll as an OLAC Service, the service must meet the following criteria:

It must provide a service based on information harvested from OLAC archives.

It must exploit at least one community-specific aspect of OLAC metadata.

A request for registration is first processed by the OLAC Coordinators, and then referred to the OLAC Council for final approval when the mechanical aspects of the application are in order.

The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the
learning organization, by Peter M, Senge. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1994.
See especially, "Anchoring vision in a set of governing ideas," pages 223-225.